I am planning, as time and money allow, to overhaul my recording nook. Taking my limited space into consideration, I've opted to move my rolling floor rack to my computer's right side, away from my gear table on the left, which includes a shorter rack up on a stand.

I'm going to make the rolling rack a multi-purpose AV center, but I'd also like to give it some studio functionality. My idea is to have a 1u or small tabletop recorder for ripping/sample harvesting from analog audio/video sources. The problem is, I don't want to screw with constantly moving cables around, or routing even more cables/switches back and forth.

I want a recorder that interfaces with the computer via USB link, such that I can record to USB/SD, and be able to dump the recorded audio directly from the external SD/USB to my PC (a laptop, if that's important), without having to remove any cards/sticks. Better yet, I'd like to have two, one in my rolling rack, and one in my tabletop rack, so I can bounce digital audio to and from the PC between them, or swap external SD/USB media between them, and then play back audio data independently from each device, meaning the unit has to be able to transfer data to and from a USB link. I could probably achieve a lot of what I want with additional audio interfaces, using my PC as the brain for simultaneous audio recording and playback, but I don't want that. I only want it to serve as a junction between recording sounds and moving them from point A to point B.

Obviously, inexpensive units are preferable, given my limited budget. But I know things like this are not cheap, unless you're willing to settle for a junky MP3 recorder. I'm open to any suggestions/recommendations, but my absolute limit is $350 for a single recorder, as affording one, let alone two recorders in that price range that is going to be a long time coming.

Takes SD card and also has 4gb internal storage, records straight to wav. Records from its own speakers or via the 1/8" jack input. Has a pull out USB interface for plugging straight in, or you can go via sd card.

Battery life is great.

Not sure if you can dump straight from the recording out via the usb though as it records, not tried that.

While I am also in the distant-future market for a portable recorder, that's not really what I want for this purpose. Granted, portable handhelds meet a lot of my requirements, but my avoiding them here is just as simple as not wanting to deal with little fiddly things lying around, as opposed to "permanent", dedicated hardware units. I have so much jumble and clutter, it's already too much. To have a nice, neat rack unit or a solid tabletop device that doesn't wiggle around and fall off the edges of surfaces at inopportune times (as happens with even the biggest, heaviest pedals I own all the time) would be preferable.

My old Jamman looper records to SMART card in WAV format, and you can USB it to a computer and download it later. I imagine the new ones will use SD instead of SMART cards.

I don't know it's limitations I've made 40 minute loops on it, I think, or maybe it was 20 minute, pretty dang long.

So then it records, and you have a looper / sampler too.

I think trying to quantify music is one of the biggest wastes of time in the world, like discussing your favourite colour or deity or pizza topping. People should realise that and get on with their life.

I'm really surprised to discover DigiTech have never produced a rack version of the JamMan. No comments yet on the posted suggestions, but I will look into them soon. I just wanted to state my disbelief, having searched for a rackmount JM with no luck.

I think trying to quantify music is one of the biggest wastes of time in the world, like discussing your favourite colour or deity or pizza topping. People should realise that and get on with their life.

From what I recall reading around the time it happened, ultra-mega-corp-subsidiary-subdivision, Harmon Kardon, acquired Lexicon some time in the mid-2000's, quite a long time after acquiring DigiTech in the 80's, assuming they didn't already own it (or maybe it was the other way around?), and the Lexicon JamMan is related in name only. I think there was only a single JamMan rack produced by Lexicon, which is incredibly limited by today's standards, and DigiTech executives simply took the JamMan name and basic concept and ran with it after one or the other was bought out by Harman Kardon.

I wonder if Lexicon has produced any modern, JamMan-esque racks since, though I am doubtful.

EDIT: My information may be partially or totally incorrect, BTW. It might've been DOD that was absorbed into DigiTech, which was already a HK company. Or possibly a DOD/Lexicon buy-out happened around the same time. I seem to remember reading both things around the same time, but this was probably more than ten years ago now.

Could be, I was just speculating. It does look like a way older product now I read the spec.

I think trying to quantify music is one of the biggest wastes of time in the world, like discussing your favourite colour or deity or pizza topping. People should realise that and get on with their life.

It seems like a lot of digital rackmount recorders with any specs I care about (I don't want a CD recorder) are just outside of what I'm comfortable with spending, and frequently have more features than I even need. I've wanted a digital multi-tracker for a long time, though, and the Zoom seems like a great choice. It's got way more features, such as multi-tracking, than I need for these specific applications, but I like the style of interface for a tabletop multi-tracker a lot.

Technically, I don't even need a recorder on the studio side, as I would only dump edited samples to the hardware device for one-shot or looped playback (I'm only just coming to this conclusion, sorry). Simply put, I want to cue samples from a glorified SD reader/player, so that I can pipe WAV samples into/through other hardware as needed. Being able to transfer samples to said SD reader via a permanent PC-USB link is a huge bonus, because I am a slug and anything else takes too long.

The AV sampling side, where I'd be ripping audio from analog sources, is where a simple recorder, with "large" (20GB+) external storage capacity for extended raw recordings, becomes more of a necessity. Wanting it to have PC-USB connectivity is purely a matter of laziness, since I am not intending to do archival rips, just quick and dirty audio recordings I can capture on the fly, and then edit on the computer at my leisure before dumping my edited samples to the large-capacity hardware sample storage device/player.

Anyway, I still need to read more on the newer entries in the JamMan line. Now that I think about it, the newer entries in Boss RC line are something I should look into as well. If I can be picky, though, I don't want a compact pedal on my A/V rack (too fiddly), but a Boss RC or JamMan pedal could definitely work on the gear table, assuming either can do all the stuff I want.

I just used an old Android phone for loops before I got the Jamman, and now I use them both. It 'cost' me a case of cheap beer.

I think trying to quantify music is one of the biggest wastes of time in the world, like discussing your favourite colour or deity or pizza topping. People should realise that and get on with their life.